It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
Reasons to be Cheerful

Reasons to be Cheerful

Winner of the 2019 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction

Summary

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Reasons to Be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe.

18 year old Lizzie Vogel finds herself a new job in a dentist's surgery after answering a classified advert in the Leicester Mercury for a 'mature lady with a strong interest in dental issues'. Working for an eccentric dental surgeon who's obsessed with becoming a Freemason, Lizzie's life is uneventful, until Andy Nicolello turns up one day to deliver a crown. Lizzie seizes her chance to find love, and soon begins calling him her boyfriend even though they have never so much as kissed or even sat next to each other on the sofa. But Andy doesn't turn out to be quite what he seems...

Reasons to be Cheerful is a painfully funny account of life as a hapless teenager in 1970s Leicestershire from the bestselling author of Love, Nina, Man at the Helm and Paradise Lodge.

Reviews

  • Pitch perfect vintage comedy
    Guardian

About the author

Nina Stibbe

Nina Stibbe was born in Leicester. She is the author of two works of non-fiction - Love, Nina and An Almost Perfect Christmas - and three previous novels: Man at the Helm, Paradise Lodge, and Reasons to be Cheerful, which is the only novel to have won both the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Comedy Women in Print Award. Love, Nina won Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was adapted by Nick Hornby into a BBC TV series. Nina Stibbe lives in Cornwall.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more